Michael Hanscom

Enthusiastic ambivert. Geeky, liberal, friendly, curious, hopepunk; trying to be a good person. (he/him)

Voltaire at the Vogue

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Just a few quick impressions, because it’s way past my bedtime on a weeknight (and having to say that before it’s even 1am is so depressing…).

Excellent show.

Wandered up to the Vogue at just a tad after 9pm and headed in. Got to say hello to some of the few people I know — Ogre, Mickey, and Kayo — and then ran into Richard just a few moments later. Ended up getting a table right up by the side of the stage, with a perfect view.

The Arid Sea opened, who I knew pretty much nothing about. Not bad at all, though admittedly, not so good that I’m going to be rushing out to pick up an album. A good opening show.

Voltaire came up shortly afterwards. While on his albums he has backing musicians, his performance was simply him and an acoustic guitar. He started by walking up to the mic and saying, “Hi! I’m…Rammstein!” and then proceeded to do a tongue-in-cheek cover of “Du Haßt Mich” (“You / You love / You love this / Even though you don’t know what I’m saying.”)

The next song was “Ex-Lover’s Lover”, and then he went through a good number of songs that I didn’t know (as The Devil’s Bris is the only album I own — something that will have to change), but were all very entertaining.

He prefaced a song about being eaten by cannibals by talking about how he’d just done a show in Japan the week before, and while he was able to do his between-song chatter in Japanese, the songs themselves were in English, so the Japanese audience didn’t pick up on all of the puns in his songs. He did say that the show in Japan went really well, though, and so he’d decided to do the exact same performance, since it went over so sucessfully — and then proceeded to speak in Japanese.

Between two of the songs he took a moment to read a few short passages from a small book he’s just put out, What is Goth?, commenting that “the surest way to a girls…(long pause)…heart…is suck-ass Goth poetry.”

There was actually a lot of fun between-song banter, and since much of the music I was hearing for the first time, that’s much of what I’m remembering. He told a story about going to the PTA meeting for his six-year old’s school, a fancy private school in New York, and realizing that both Dave Gahan (the lead singer of Depeche Mode) and David Bowie also had children in the same school (“The parent choir is going to rock!”).

Also, just before a very sweet (if disturbing) lullabye “written to scare my son to death, apparently,” he told another short story about his son. Apparently he came home and heard one of his son’s friends talking to the nanny, and declaring that, “that coat smells like his dad.” At his point, Voltaire paused, hiding around the corner to find out just how bad he smelled.

“What does his dad smell like?” asked the nanny.

“Evil.” (Much laughter here from the audience.)

Then the nanny followed up on this. “And what does evil smell like?”

And then, very matter-of-factly, the friend just said, “Pretty good, actually.”

He ended up finishing his show with “When You’re Evil,” only with a slight twist to the final lyrics:

It gets so lonely being evil.
What I’d do to see a smile,
Even for a little while,
And no one loves you when you’re DJ Eternal Darkness…

All in all, much fun, and well worth staying up past my bedtime for.

iTunes “Anniversary” by Voltaire from the album Devil’s Bris, The (1998, 4:35).

The Cannon

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I’d never heard of Sarah Vowell, the voice of Violet Parr in The Incredibles, before I started to read the various reviews of the film once it opened. Turns out she’s a writer and radio personality, which is how her voice caught director Brad Bird’s ear when he heard her story about her father’s cannon on This American Life.

The Luxo weblog has tracked down the broadcast in question, and it’s well worth hearing (streaming RealMedia audio).

iTunes “Push Downstairs” by Underworld from the album Beaucoup Fish (1999, 6:03).

From the vaults

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I’ve been playing with HTML for quite a few years now. Every so often over the years, I’ve actually been bright enough to make a quick copy of my website and archive it. Tonight, in a mad burst of misplaced nostalgia, I pulled them all out of the digital dustbin and have put them back online. As an added bonus, this allowed me to put some really old entries into my archives, from the pre-“blogging” days when I was just hand-coding pages and updating them as I saw fit. My archives date back to 1995 now!

Curious enough to check out just how my design and web skills have evolved over the years? Feel free to wander through. Some links will work, some won’t — caveat emptor and all that.

  • February 27, 1996: Yup, you read that right — 1996. We’re talking seriously old-school here (“Netscape 2.0 Enhanced”, even). Looks best if you shrink the width of your browser window to just a bit wider than the graphics, as this was back when 640×480 was in wide useage. Check out that announcements page, too — reverse chronological order, date and time stamped…blogging before anyone knew what blogging was (eat your heart out, Dave Winer)!

  • February 14, 1997: One year later, and things have improved dramatically. This basic design would last through the next three archives, and while it’s a bit broken now, I still like the general idea. Featured one of the first incarnations of a Gigs Music Theatre site, though it’s just a single page here.

  • April 21, 1997: A few months later. A little less content, as I started to focus on expanding the Gig’s page. Design is the same (and is still slightly broken in modern browsers).

  • March 30, 1998: Another year goes by, and things are still pretty static. The design is the same (though by this point, it works in modern browsers). The Gig’s page has evolved into a full-fledged site by this point, though.

  • August 5, 2002: Whoops! Four years went by with no archiving. I’ve been kicking myself for this of late, as I was doing some hand-coded “blogging” back then that I don’t have copies of anymore. Still, at least I have this. By this point, the design has changed majorly, and I was using MovableType to handle my weblogging.

My lord I’ve been doing this for a long time.

iTunes “Kat-A-Mandu” by Poems for Laila from the album Katamandu (1992, 5:11).

Delicious Library

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Ars Technica has a great review of Delicious Library, the new book/movie/music/game cataloguing software from Delicious Monster. I’ve downloaded the demo and have started to poke around with it…so far, quite enjoying what I see.

The second page of the review does a wonderful job of going into just why we Mac people are Mac people, and how nice it can be to get software also made by and for Mac people.

There is simply a “climate of excellence” on the Mac platform. Any developer that does not live up to community standards is looked down upon, or even shunned. Commercial, open source, freeware, shareware, it doesn’t matter: pay attention to detail, or else.

Windows users, think about what your typical download and installation experience is like. How many dialogs are you presented with? What do the file names and icons look like? Do you have to run an installer? What kind of manual clean-up is required afterwards?

Linux users, when you look at the carefully laid out disk image contents in the screenshot and links above, think about how far “desktop Linux” has to come before it can even begin to think about details like how single-icon drag-installed applications are arranged in their disk image windows.

Yes, I know, all of this is “pointless” and “dumb” because looks are meaningless. It’s the software that counts—the code, the bits, not the packaging, right? And so we come to an important difference between Mac enthusiasts and other computer users. Mac users understand that the packaging counts too (and are willing to pay for it). Happily, you get a lot of nice things “for free” on the Mac platform these days: composited windows, large icons, rich disk image and application bundle standards, etc.

So very true.

P2P: Germany, Austria, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Italy, Greece

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In the summer of 1990, just after my junior year of high school, I was accepted into the People to People program as a “student ambassador” and got to go on a six-week trip across Europe. Starting with a few days in Washington, D.C., we travelled through Germany, Austria, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Italy, and Greece.

Going through boxes the other night, I found my photo album for the trip, and have just scanned them all in and posted them online. There’s a small selection on Flickr, and the entire collection in our family photo gallery.

It’s both funny and frustrating to look back on these now, for a variety of reasons. One of the most frustrating is that I ran out of film in Austria and (being my ever-absentminded self) didn’t manage to get traveller’s checks cashed quickly enough to have the right currency to pick up more film until we hit Italy, so I’m missing the middle few weeks of the trip (it’d be so much easier these days with the proliferation of networked ATMs worldwide, but this was in the dark ages of the early ’90’s, after all).

Often what really strikes me when I look back on the trip is the simple fact that with the jaunt through Hungary and Yugoslavia, I’ve visited countries that doesn’t exist anymore, or at least don’t exist as they were back then.

We were only in Zagreb, Yugoslavia for one night, but a small group of us decided that we didn’t want to just sit around the hotel room and ended up going out to a discotheque. About eight or ten of us went, and I quickly got frustrated with the group — they were slightly freaked out at being out and about in a Communist country, and just bunched up with each other. I thought this was more than a little silly, and ended up striking out on my own, wandering around the club, and peoplewatching, the same as I’d do in any other club. Far more entertaining for me.

I don’t know what Budapest, Hungary looks like these days, but I will always remember it as being one of the most beautiful cities that I got to visit in Europe. The city is actually two old cities on either side of a river, Buda on one side, and Pest on the other. I don’t remember anymore which side we were on, but our hotel sat high on a hillside overlooking the river and the city below, and I spent one very pleasant night sitting out on my balcony, listening to my walkman and watching the city below. I even knew when it was midnight (or possibly one in the morning), as that was when the lights on all the government buildings automatically turned off, suddenly letting those landmarks sink back into dark anonynimity with the rest of the city.

The pictures themselves aren’t the greatest quality, between being taken with a fairly cheap point-and-shoot and being fourteen years old (yikes!). Still, it’s fun for me to have them around. Feel free to browse through either the short version or the whole shebang.

Brad Bird

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With the success of The Incredibles, more people are finally starting to take notice of director Brad Bird‘s first feature effort, the excellent Iron Giant. In a (very deservedly) gushing look at Iron Giant, MTV’s Karl Heitmueller wraps up with this statement:

Like the Brothers Grimm, Dr. Seuss and Maurice Sendak, Brad Bird knows that kids can handle some tough concepts, and he never insults the intelligence of his audience. The greatest children’s entertainment has always been challenging and sometimes difficult. But those are the books, films and shows that transcend pop culture to become timeless classics. Like “It’s a Wonderful Life” and “The Wizard of Oz,” “The Iron Giant” is one of those films that was a failure initially but whose stature continues to grow over time.

Very true, and I wish more people would learn how to approach children like that.

(via Luxo)